Shame and failure

Do we all have our moments that we relive and think, “what happened there?” and “where did that come from?”. I want to recount a couple of mine, to show the nature of thinking about social systems and events in them.

I worked a long, long time ago on Crossrail, back when it was still a project with an annual funding grant from the Treasury. It was a joke in many ways but instructive also. With a colleague, I was invited to provide consultancy support to the directors. They had a hunch that the IT department was having fun rather than making a contribution. When I asked the obvious question about what the directors thought the IT department was for and what value was being looked for, the answer was that they thought you had to have one.

As I tell this tale I would like you to understand that I was green but intuitive, in a way I did not understand myself. The project was a joint operation of what was then British Rail and London Underground. So far so obvious — Crossrail had planned operations that would need to interface with both.

Given its status, what the Crossrail project did was plan. It couldn’t build anything. So, it planned the architecture of underground stations, it planned and specified rolling stock, it made projections of cost and how long the project would take to construct. I don’t know how common this is, but there were two plans. There was a detailed cost plan that itemised everything that would have to be bought and every work package that would need to be contracted. And there was a time plan that worked out how long everything would take and the dependencies in that. I hope you have spotted that there is an IT dimension to keeping these plans up to date.

My first big warning signal was also about planning. I shared a long train journey with one of the directors. The annualised grant from the Treasury made for a desperately inefficient project process. The project spent lots of time thinking what it needed to do and then spending money on anything it could so as not to lose grant in the following year. I was asking this director about planning this annual cycle to make better use of time and money and he claimed for nearly three hours not to be able to understand what I was saying. Despite the project being all about planning a railway, the concept of planning the project was too difficult.

To do engineering under the ground you need permission from the landowners you are underneath. While I was there, the project discovered that these permissions had changed and millions of pounds of design work on underground stations and tunnels would have to be redone.

Anyway, I, in my naïve wisdom, thought that integrating the cost plan and the time plan would be a suitable project to see whether the IT department was worth its salt. And to work out what the implications were for trying to do this, we would have a big workshop. An afternoon exploring what the connections and disconnections were between the two plans.

I understood at some intuitive level that this workshop was a problem. What I did was to contract with a colleague that he run the workshop. His reputation was such that this appeared a solid option. And he was suitably professorial: half-moon glasses, grey stubble on a large head, lots of gravitas. In the event he was torn apart, positively destroyed, by the people in the workshop.[1]

What was it I had understood and not understood? I no longer know which way round, but one of the plans, maybe the cost plan, belonged to staff seconded to the project from London Underground and the other plan belonged to staff seconded from British Rail. I was looking at the project, but their identities and careers turned on their employers. Relations between British Rail and London Underground were somewhere between frosty and hostile because they were competitors for public funding. Oops. Deep shame. The questions that I didn’t ask and the issues bigger than the project that no-one was about to share with me.

With hindsight, the presenting issue of the IT department was merely a superficial symptom of a situation that was not going to be resolved.

More directors

I won’t name the perpetrators this time, but a major supermarket not used to using consultants. I saw a tweet yesterday with a list of favourite oxymorons; top of the list was ‘executive team’. As a tiny example of teamwork, the directors had agreed a cost-cutting measure of removing everyone’s work mobile phones. They had given the task of telling staff to the IT director, who understood perfectly well that he was going to get an extreme reaction. He described it as an Exocet[2] heading for him, a phrase that dates the events!

Par for the course was this: if I had scheduled a meeting with one of these guys, they would invite me in to their office, sit me on a chair by the wall and ignore me for an hour. One guy opened he office door slightly, wedged his foot in the gap and asked me to justify why I need to speak with him. Another used his senior manager as a chauffeur when he needed to go shopping in London.

In a weird twist, my own company accountant just happened to back onto the house of a newly appointed security director, an ex-policeman of course. There were overheard conversations. This gentleman, with newly appointed zeal, ran an exercise that involved calling directors at the weekend. Thereafter he was taken to one side and it was explained to him that his role was largely symbolic.

You can imagine that getting the main board directors together for a workshop took some organising. We had a day, and I did some meticulous planning. I wanted the directors to go on a bit of journey and see the issues from different realities. I took the theory from Will McWhinney’s Paths of Change. I desperately wanted them to see that there were things they needed to acknowledge and confront together.

What happened when I got them together and explained what I had in mind and where we would start? One of the directors, Mr Foot-in-the-Door, said very firmly that they did not play games. None of the other directors would challenge him. My process was in the heap in the floor as half the “team” decided they had work to do. Deep shame and confusion.

Narratives, ownership

“Don’t expect things to make sense in the terms in which they are put forward.” In another engagement which Philip and I did together, the reason for doing some systems work was simply to do something when nothing could be done. The County Council concerned had been shafted by the government and it had caused £30M of wasted money and a lot of bad blood between County and District. Hence our mission to do something interesting that has nothing to do with the problem. The client was not about to explain why the work was being commissioned.[3]

One of the lessons I am struggling to learn in a rural community is that almost everyone just has to deal with the next presenting issue. The sheep have got out, the hens are sick, a neighbour needs urgent help. I get more and more like that myself. The only difference in corporate life is that there is a cover story about purpose. You tell stories about why you have to do this and that to justify yourself. Some of what you need to do fits the story easily and some of it is survival stuff. The narrative is just a layer of complexity and obfuscation. And the consultants who buy into the narrative of purpose are simply complicit in the faffing about and the stress and the burnout.

Sometimes the need for obscurity is obvious when you find it. I was once working with a student union on a smartcard scheme that would have a wallet on it so that the use of cash was reduced. I talked to the manager of a big student bar where it seemed to me that drinks got more expensive as people became more drunk. The manager laughed at me in a helpful way; the bar could only work as a cash economy with workers paid in cash. It was a no-questions-asked environment — cleaning up its sales practices and employment practices would simply close it down. It was a nexus rather than a business.

My role? I was supposedly mentoring a guy who renamed himself Roy Smoothe — really! — in a university incubator. He was able to pursue the smartcard scheme with the Student Union despite the fact that it was not going to succeed in its key functions. The Union needed to be seen to be addressing the issues that the card was not going to sort out! Roy had a solipsistic way of not seeing a problem in anything that advanced his agenda. I had to think about what entrepreneurial flair might be. How Smoothe was OK?

These days, I live with an articulate and somewhat aggressive two-year-old. There are rules set out for his safety and elements of respect for others which are insisted on. All this framework guideline material is instantly co-opted into providing reasons and excuses for him to do what he was going to do anyway. There is no way to cut across this relentless levelling: nothing anyone says or does is other than future material for the game, and little ones have infinite energy for the game. For what it is worth, I generally try the paradoxical stance like asking someone if the lad is poorly because he is being so quiet. Organisational life is no different.

A final anecdote from some leadership training for a Housing Association. We did all the discovery stuff over several days about what people thought leadership was and what else it might be. In the final session the Chief Exec joined in the fun. Except that he demonstrated absolutely every single leadership failing that we had discussed and no-one could do anything about the obvious faultline in the organisation. Belling the cat — how to improve leadership without compelling behaviour change in the boss?

Purpose

People in my experience are interested in stated and conscious purpose because it gives them leverage. First, I get you to tell me what you want to achieve and then I persuade you that you need to take my advice to achieve your purpose. It is a sleight-of-hand. The world is full of people who know your business better than you do. Telling someone your real purpose is like giving them kompromat.

I listened to a talk by a very fast-talking US lawyer, a long time before the current verge of civil war there, explain that there were no circumstances in which it was safe to give the police information. He said the information would be stored against your identity and it was odds-on that eventually a circumstantial finger would we pointed at you. In a similar vein, Mark Suster reminds us that electronic communications aren’t private; like many, he’s had his “private” emails read out loud at depositions.[4] The context where the information is later used is not in your control and never has been.

Purpose in organisations is like that: you can only take provisional sides in political games, and only about things that don’t matter. I like the directness of a London Underground engineer in a workshop about how to collaborate better: “Look, this is fourth time I have been collaborated and if I don’t go along with it, I will be fired”.

If you get a moral twang reading this and think I am just being cynical, on what basis is it OK to coerce people into chasing dishonest and often sociopathic corporate goals? Respect is indivisible and lack of respect leads to the failure and shame this blog is about.

[1] Only months later, he died of a heart attack.

[2] A Falklands-era missile, in case you’d have to look it up too

[3] As for the true reasons, everything was in Private Eye…

[4] Philip’s one-time almost boss in a sliding-doors moment at Build Online: https://twitter.com/msuster/status/1279457249799270400